Carte Blanche to follow up on Danie Krugel

It’s unpossible! Carte Blanche will be following up on the Danie Krugel episode. I received this response to my original suggestion:

Thank you for your input. We are planning to broadcast a follow-up programme on Danie Krugel’s invention towards the end of January. Hope you will be watching.

Now let’s hope they get it right this time. I responded with a lot of links.

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This entry was posted on January 8, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Midweek Cuckoo, Pseudoscience, South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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I think it’s so silly the way main stream media have ‘suddenly’ discovered (cottoned-on) to the fact that the web community have such a big influence on opinion and are by and large so totally scornful of main stream media and biased inaccurate reporting. The Time ‘person of the year’ stunt was awful.

Guys, come on. Give the guy some credit! This does not break the laws of physics at all, especially if you are dealing with quantum mechanics. Do any of you even have a 3rd year degree in the subject? Cause if not then I suggest you shut up about it. It has already been proven that protons can be stripped of their electrons in a lab, and (under controlled conditions) a proton somewhere else will do the exact same thing. We have been able to beam vast amounts of information to Mars using this approach and therefore I find it plausible that you would be able to locate a certain type of proton/electron structure based on a sample. (http://www.sp.phy.cam.ac.uk/SPWeb/research/HFSET/)

“Do any of you even have a 3rd year degree in the subject? Cause if not then I suggest you shut up about it.”

Hi Jeanne, I have a 3rd year degree in the subject. I have also taken courses in Quantum Mechanics, Relativistic Quantum Mechanics (that’s QM behaviour at near-c speeds), Particle Physics and Plasma Physics at a Masters level, and I have an MSc in Astrophysics. Danie has no idea what he’s talking about.

Danie continually changes his explanation of how the device works as it becomes obvious that each of his explanations makes no sense. First he said he was extracting DNA from the hair, but then it became obvious this was not possible without the roots, so he seems to have stopped saying that. He said he was using the GPS satellite system, which is again utter rubbish due to the very way in which the GPS system works – it is not possible within the bounds of their engineering for the satellites to do what he claims they do. For them to receive a signal from the bodies at the wavelengths the operate in, Danie would have had to plant a transmitter in the bodies that he supposedly is trying to find, before trying to find them. I think you see the logical flaws there.

Now, and for the first time so far, he claims it’s Quantum Mechanics, which is always the last refuge for people hoping the layperson will give up. We could run around for years trying to figure out exactly which counter-intuitive quantum phenomenon could be responsible… which is exactly what these people are counting on when they use it as an explanation.

You will note that in your link the experiment requires the use of a cryostat. Are you seriously contemplating the possibility that Danie is able to perform the same at room temperature? Seriously, the quantum phenomena that would be required to even pretend an explanation for his pretend device can only be replicated in laboratories with extremely delicate and expensive equipment under controlled circumstances. I’d love it if some backyard inventor in South Africa had created a pocket cyclotron, but you have to admit it’s hardly likely.

And anyway, all that aside, quantum phenomena CANNOT be used to explain macroscopic, classical events because the probability terms that manifest at the quantum level, and which are responsible for the counter-intuitive behaviour of QM, are cancelled out at the classical level. This is the very reason that QM seems so counter-intuitive to humans… because it DOESN’T manifest at a classical scale, which is the scale we’ve evolved to survive in, and the scale Danie is operating in.

I suggest you read Murray Gell-Mann’s excellent “The Quark and the Jaguar” for further explanation. For a shorter explanation, see my post here.